Facebook Has A New Way To Make Money On Your Data — And Potentially Learn More About You Than Ever

Facebook has a new way to make money off of your data—and,
potentially, to learn more about you than it ever could
before.

If you’re a Facebook user, the company’s machines already know
all the things you’ve explicitly told Facebook over the years,
like your name, age, email address, friends, likes, and
interests. They also already know how you behave on Facebook,
including which types of stories you’re likely to click on and
which friends’ status updates you like the most.

Now they’re beginning to learn more about how you behave when
you aren’t on Facebook. For instance, they
have the ability to know whenever you visit a Web page that has
a “like” button. For years Facebook insisted it wouldn’t use
this sort of data to track your activity for commercial
purposes. Recently, it decided it might start doing that after
all.

Facebook
Atlasfacebook

On Monday, the company announced the next step: a new advertising platform
called Atlas. Atlas will allow advertisers to harness
Facebook’s data about you to target you on non-Facebook sites
and apps, with ads not purchased through Facebook. Again, these
are not Facebook ads, and they won’t be shown on Facebook—but
they’ll be drawing on all of Facebook’s knowledge of you as an
individual in order to target you. They’ll be able to do that
even if you’re not logged into Facebook and have cookies turned
off. Facebook calls this "people-based marketing."

The move puts Facebook in direct competition with Google’s
DoubleClick service, offering advertisers the chance to target
users and measure their ads’ reach on a potentially wide array
of sites as well as mobile apps. The potential edge, for
Facebook, is that Atlas won’t rely on browser cookies. Cookies
can be cleared, they don’t cross from one browser to another,
and they’re notoriously ineffectual on mobile devices. Google
has been working to address this
problem. But with Atlas, Facebook may be leaping ahead.

If you’ve ever logged into Facebook on your phone, Facebook has
linked your phone’s unique identification number to your
Facebook account. So when you use another app or a different
browser on the same device, Facebook’s computers still know
it’s you, and Atlas will be able to use that information to
help advertisers reach you. Visit a site from your desktop
computer using a browser on which you've logged into Facebook,
and Facebook will know you’re the same person who visited it
from your mobile phone awhile back.

Facebook has responded to privacy concerns by
clarifying that Atlas won’t actually give third-party
advertisers any information about you. It will just use that
information to make sure they’re reaching their intended
audience.

But one of the biggest long-term impacts of Atlas may be to
expand Facebook’s own ability to track you across the Web and
mobile apps. When you visit a site that uses Atlas to serve
ads, you’ll be giving Atlas more information about yourself
that it could potentially add to the ever-expanding database
that Facebook has on you.

A Facebook spokesman told me that the information Atlas gleans
about your browsing habits will not be sent back to Facebook.
“Atlas doesn’t tell marketers who you are, and Atlas also
doesn’t share information about you back to Facebook,” he said.
Of course, Facebook has been known to change its mind about
such things. When I asked the spokesman if he could promise
users that Atlas would never share this information, he
declined to comment.